Alexander was holding the middle-aged doctor, Farley, by the neck against the wall of our bedroom in the Mayfair house.
I watched as he slammed him into the wall again and then again, his face screwed up with vehement fury.
“I asked you a question,” he roared, rearing back with one fist raised so that he could hammer it into the wall beside Farley’s head.
Dry wall and dust exploded around Alexander’s fist, and he punched it into the wall and then pull it back out.
“The next blow is to your face. Now, tell me who paid you not to give her birth control?” Alexander repeated at a lower register, but his voice quaked with suppressed rage. “If you don’t tell me now, I will drag you to Pearl Hall, string you up in the trees at the edge of the forest, and skin you alive like a felled deer.”
“I, it’s,” Farley stammered, so wild-eyed his lids were peeled back into the crease of his eye sockets. “I’m sorry, but he’s scarier than you are when it comes down to it.”
An animal sound rumbled through Alexander’s throat as he carted the man over to the door, wrenched it open, and threw him out into the hall.
Instantly, Riddick appeared, his redhead complexion gone scarlet with anger.
“He talks or he dies,” Alexander ordered, before shutting the door with a clang and then leaning back against it.
He closed his eyes and rubbed a hand over his tired face. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked every minute of his thirty-five years.
“Xan?” I croaked once, the word falling like dead weight to the blankets tucked under my chin. “Alexander?”
Immediately, his eyes snapped open and locked with mine.
They were filled like crystal balls with a swirling torment on emotions I wasn’t psychic enough to decipher.
I patted the bed weakly, too tired to speak to him from so far away.
He was at my side in a heartbeat, carefully peeling back the heavy blankets so that he could slide underneath and gently roll into my side so that he was leaning over me. His fingers went to my hair, pulling and twisting at a strand to soothe himself more than me.
He loved my hair and drew solace from it even more than I did.
“What a horrible end to your birthday,” I ventured, letting my eyes drift shut for a moment as I absorbed the warmth and comfort of his body.
“Don’t joke, Cosima.” I opened my eyes at his use of my name and saw the sobriety of his features. “Did you know you were pregnant?”
I squeezed my eyes shut as a hollow remnant of pain panged through the empty walls of my womb.
“Not anymore,” I whispered.
“No,” he agreed, implacably. “Did you know?”
“I guessed. The past few days, I’d been overly emotional and nauseated.”
I felt his fingers graze my neck, and I realized that I was still wearing the pearl and ruby collar. “Look at me, bella.”
When my eyes opened, they were filled with the tears I didn’t want him to see. One fell off the cliff of my lower lid and burned a path down my cheek. Alexander stopped it with one knuckle and brought the salty drop to his lips.
“I am sorry this happened to you,” he said, filled with gravitas that pressed like a weight against my sore heart.
His anguish made mine all the more acute.
“I feel as though I’m always saying that,” he admitted as he twirled my hair.
“You are,” I agreed without malice.
I’d been through so much because of him.
But I’d grown so much too, just as I would grow from the ashes of this last tragedy like a phoenix.
“So heartrendingly beautiful, so savagely brave,” he whispered.
“Mmm,” I hummed, closing my eyes again because his handsome face combined with his beautiful words were too much for me to take even when I was at full strength. “My head feels wrong.”
“You have a bad concussion, bruised ribs, a sprained ankle, and innumerable bruises. It was a nasty fall that honestly could have been much worse. When…” He sucked in a fortifying breath then let it out slowly. “When I saw you lying there, I thought at first that you had broken your neck.”
“Someone pushed me,” I murmured, remembering the distinctive imprint of two hands pressed to my back as if into wet concrete.
I knew I would always feel them there, a scar on my memory that was impacted on my flesh.
“I thought I saw a figure behind you, but I was too far away to make anything out. Do you have any thought of who it could be?”
I shook my head. There was no one at the ball that I’d even known.
“Did anyone else know about the baby?”
“I think Mrs. White guessed tonight while she was helping me get ready,” I admitted. “But I doubt she would have been at the ball to push me down the stairs. She could have found a much more opportune time or way to get rid of me or the baby or both around here or at Pearl Hall.”
Alexander’s eyes narrowed into the distance as he narrowed down suspects in his mind.
“How did you know Dr. Farley wasn’t giving me proper birth control?” I asked, shivering as a chill swept through me.
“You’re cold,” he noticed, gently scooping me into his arms and then carefully moving us both to the edge of the bed so he could stand up and carry me into the bathroom.
I stayed quiet, my hand linked behind his neck as he sat on the edge of the bath and turned on the faucets. Immediately, the bathroom began to fill with steam and the scent of my spicy bubble bath as he dumped half the bottle in the bottom of the tub.
Finally, he looked down at me in his arms, and a little of his outrageous anger dimmed at the sight.
“Riddick had been suspecting of the man for a while, and when he did some bloodwork after Landon flogged you, he thought something was off. It was a natural guess. When I called him here under the guise to attend to you, I confronted him, and he was easy rattled.”
“But he didn’t confess who asked him to do it.”
“No.” His jaw clenched as he undid the tie of my fluffy terry cloth robe and then stood me up to be rid of it before he helped me into the quickly filling tub.
The hot sting of the water felt like blissful agony against my sore muscles, the kind of duality I usually experience with my Master. I settled back into the bubbles and closed my eyes.
Moments later, there was a splash and I squeaked as Alexander swung his other leg into the water. He softly pushed me forward so that he could sink between the edge of the huge tub and my body, then he arranged me comfortably between his legs.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he opened the bottle of my shampoo and squirted the gel into his palms.
“Bathing you for a change. I think you deserve all the tenderness in the world after what you’ve been through tonight. Lean back again and let me care for you.”
Reluctantly, I placed my head back on his chest. His sudsy hands worked across my scalp, massaging the lather into my aching head with just the right amount of strength.
“I thought you’d be angry,” I confessed as I leaned into his touch.
“I am.”
“At me, I mean,” I clarified. “Because of the baby.”
I hummed as his firm fingers kneaded down the length of my neck and then across my shoulders.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Still…”
“Have I proven myself to be irrational? I would never hold you responsible for something like that, even if you had been on birth control as you were supposed to be. Life is never what we want it to be; the trick is to make the most of it.”
“So wise for a man who seems to do so many things he doesn’t want to do.”
“Touché,” he conceded. “Though rarely are circumstances as complicated as these.”
“For what it’s worth,” I purred as turned on the handheld facet and directed the hot water over my hair, careful to keep the suds out of my eyes. “I’ve never met anyone more capable of directi
ng their own life. I think you could get out of any trap and win any advantage you set your mind to.”
He was quiet for a while, contentedly rinsing my hair and then soothingly rubbing a sponge along my skin, mindful of my many bruises.
“When you lose your mother to mindless violence and lack of reason, it changes you,” he explained quietly. “Any kind of loss works to harden a person, but she was my ally in that house even more than Edward was. We were too different as children, and I was five years older, so I considered myself too old to play many games with him. He was still in nappies when I was being trained in the dungeon. My mum championed me with Noel and made sure my life of top marks, athletic endeavours, and social climbing had some free time for fun. She died, and that sliver of me that cared for levity and light died with her.”
He pressed his nose to the hair over my ear and inhaled deeply of my scent. “I know you feel you are only worth the price of your beauty, Cosima, but you underestimate the multifaceted nature of your loveliness. It’s not just the geometry of your body and the wet between your thighs; it’s not even the colour of your money eyes or the heavy weight of your hair. It’s the way you make everyone around you feel beautiful about themselves. I am beginning to understand that I am addicted to the way I feel about myself when I’m with you. Like I’m the hero and not the villain.”
My throat felt swollen under the weight of his collar, but I didn’t cry because I knew once I did, I wouldn’t stop. There was a hollow place in my soul that I’d carried around with me like an empty pocketbook for years, waiting for some currency to fill it with. Alexander’s words slotted into place with the clink of coins and the crinkle of bank notes, giving monetary value to an asset I hadn’t known I possessed.
Even if that was the only gift he ever gave me, it was enough to last a lifetime.
“I don’t want the loss of this baby to turn you hard,” he continued after letting me digest for a moment. “He or she could only have been a few weeks old and simply wasn’t meant to be. You did nothing wrong to warrant what happen to you or the baby. If anyone is at fault, it is me and my host of enemies.”
“I’m not without enemies,” I reminded him, my words nasal with unshed tears. “You once called me your enemy.”
“And how wrong I was,” he muttered as he finished washing me. “Now, it’s to understand who the real enemy is knocking on our gates so that I can kill him for hurting you.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?” I asked because even though he’d murdered Landon, that death had a surreal cast to it.
It felt more like a terrible nightmare than reality; a death that had broken the terror and brought us back to reality.
Plus, it was difficult for me to feel remorse for a man who had run roughshod over my mental health since I was a girl and then beat me bloody as a woman all just because he could.
“Yes,” Alexander agreed easily, scooping me into his arms as he stood and the water sluiced off us.
He settled me on the bathmat and then retrieved a fluffy towel to gingerly dry my body. It felt surreal for him to take care of me so diligently when I was the one meant to cater to his every need, but there was also a strange rightness about his manner. If submission had taught me anything, it was that it was the submissive who was the most revered and the most vulnerable, and that it was that exact vulnerability that held the Dominants so much in their thrall.
To have a man or woman expose themselves to you so completely must be an intoxicating high, I thought, as Alexander bent his head to concentrate on drying my feed. Maybe nearly as enthralling as seeing a strong man bend the knee in order to do something as simple as dry me after a bath.
I placed a hand on his strong shoulder as he produced a plain pair of black lace full bottom underwear from the drawer under the sink and helped me into them. He barely dried himself before he moved us into the bedroom and plucked one of his undershirts from the open closet so that I could pull it over my head. Only when I was attired did he settle me in bed. I leaned back against the pillows with a sigh that drudged up all the wreckage in my soul and expunged it through my open mouth.
I was weary to my very bones, and I just wanted to sleep without nightmares.
Alexander returned and settled at the edge of the bed to drag a comb through my hair. I barely stirred as the methodical strokes lulled me further into relaxation and slumber. Dimly, I was aware of his thick fingers braiding my hair out of my face and then his hands softly lowering me back to the pillows.
I woke up again when he crawled into bed beside me and gathered me like tissue paper into the vacant space between his arms.
“I don’t know what this changes,” he admitted as he kissed the hollow behind my ear. “But it changes something.”
I’d been in Britain for ten months, nearly a year of hard service under my belt and another four to follow it.
Only, it wasn’t hard anymore, not in the weeks since the miscarriage. Alexander was attentive as a celebrant to his deity, bathing with me every morning and dressing me just as I dressed him. He ate dinner with me every night when he returned from work and continued to fuck me, in ways both hard and soft, as before.
But it was the way he looked at me sometimes with an edge of primal fear like a cornered predator even as he let me caress him or question him about his day that made me question his emotional landscape.
It was as if he feared my intimacy as much as he craved it.
My life at Pearl Hall was full in many other ways too. I enjoyed my time in the kitchens with Douglas as he taught me to make wonderful confections out of spun sugar and chocolate lacework. Mrs. White was determined to teach me the lady-like art of needlepoint even though the only thing I’d ever be close to stitching successfully was the word “sex” in shaky script. I improved every day in my fencing and martial arts training, whether it was with Riddick or Xan, and I’d taken to riding my beautiful golden stallion, Helios, over the extensive grounds.
For the first time in a long time, I felt a sense of joy in my everyday life, and England was beginning to feel like home.
My mother noticed my accent, how I’d clipped off the ends of vowels and stopped instinctively rolling my r’s. I began to notice it too, how my English had ceased to skip and hop with the foreign lyricism of my homeland, how my vocabulary had swelled to include such British sayings as “scrummy,” “botched,” “chuffed,” and “dodgy.” When I commented on it to Alexander, he’d smiled his secret smile with his eyes half closed in pleasure and then fucked me so hard, he had me cursing in Italian.
He did that a lot, it seemed. Reading into my skin like a blind man with Braille, and the subtitles in my eyes like a deaf man with the news. As if his other senses could tell him my secrets more readily than his sight could.
Sometimes I wondered, after he’d worked over my body until I was crying out his name, what kinds of secrets he’d already divined under my skin.
The happier Alexander and I became, drawn together inexplicably by the loss of our child and the mystery of his or her death, the more agitated Noel seemed.
I would catch him pacing down the hall, muttering under his breath as his palm twitched, then smacked against his leg, and sometimes, at strange hours of the day, I would hear something like the wind howling through the walls of the house and wonder if Noel still kept a slave hidden somewhere on the grounds.
One day when I was on the way to the gym, I even witnessed a peculiar tableau. Mrs. White had been crying on her knees, her head tilted into Noel’s thigh as he sat at the kitchen table below stairs and stroked her hair.
The image stirred a deep mistrust inside my soul, but I had not real reason to be suspicious of Mrs. White and only speculation and terrible history with his son to pin against Noel.
So I watched, but waited quietly until one morning when Alexander and I were cuddled in bed after a vigorous session tossing around the idea of him teaching me how to exercise his falcon, Astor.
The door to my bedroom flew
open, and Noel stood in the frame, shaking a letter terminated in a familiar red seal in one hand.
A missive from the Order of Dionysus.
“They cut the bloody funding to my port project in Falmouth,” he seethed as he stalked into the room and ripped the covers off us to reveal out naked, tangled limbs. “You fucking cock-up, this is not how men do business.”
“As a more successful man than yourself,” Alexander said haughtily, despite his lack of dress. He stood to get toe to toe with his combative father and stare down at him from his more advance height. “I dare to disagree.”
“Fix this, boy,” Noel demanded, shoving the thick card stock into Xan’s chest. “Fix it now and stop being such a pussy. Your mother, your grandfather, and the entire Davenport clan are rolling over in their grave right now as they witness your idiocy and pigheadedness. Maybe if you weren’t so tied up in that one’s snatch, you’d remember what you brought her here to do.”
My ears burned at Noel’s crude language, but it was my chest that churned with rolling flames.
I hated Noel more at that moment for speaking to Alexander and relating to him the way he did than I’d ever hated anyone for myself.
Noel stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him so forcibly that the painting rattled on the wall.
Alexander didn’t move.
He stared down at the paper in his hand blindly.
“Xan,” I asked softly, moving to the edge of the bed to place a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“He has a point,” he murmured. “I can’t forget your purpose here.”
A shiver of foreboding rocked through me.
“I can have more than one purpose. I am not just a utilitarian tool,” I told him.
His eyes slid to mine, but they were some place deep inside his mind where the maze of his thoughts was at its darkest.
“Aren’t you?”
I watched as he dropped the letter to the ground and marched from the room, naked yet utterly regal on his athletic, rolling gait.
He didn’t return at all that day, and instead of eating dinner alone, I saddled up Helios with the help of the stable boy and took off.
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